The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
It is generally understood that being large and high density arrays, TCAMs can be largely affected by soft-errors. Common approaches of detecting and correcting these errors include a mechanism (hardware or software) which repeatedly reads the TCAM rules and compare them to corresponding error correction codes (ECC) stored in another memory. In general, the Reads are highly time consuming operations in TCAMs, and amount of TCAM entries can be very large. Therefore, the common process of checking the entire TCAM for soft-errors can take mass amount of time. In addition, overall failure-in-time (FIT) rate in TCAM is directly proportional to the time between the upset and its subsequent correction by the mechanism (in worst case, time needed to scan the entire array). Thus, a more efficient mechanism of checking a TCAM for soft-errors may be very helpful.